Threshold
by Extravior
Summary: Years ago, the Caroline-Edwards case set the superstitious world into a frenzy, but Ethan Schade was unconvinced. Now, an all-too-similar set of circumstances seems to have dragged him, and his best friend, Lexi Shaw, into a strange new world, the world of the Kirby Anime.


Authors Note: This is a reupload for my original story, The Limits of Fact. The story was acting weird, so I decided to reset it. I'm also using this opportunity as a blatant excuse to rewrite some parts of the story I felt were weak, so there's that.

Enjoy!

* * *

Ah, summer. Where kids frolic free from their educational chains, and parents weep for the end to their guaranteed "Me-Time." Days filled with quiet anticipation await nights of play in the starlit backyards and Rustic, All-American foods cooked with meticulous care over the coals of a George Foreman. That special part of the year when you can spend half a day having a magical time in a land of vacations and barbeques, and the other half wallow in the unbearable agony of heat stroke. But, despite the intense rays of carcinogenic misery, summer was the one time of year when you could see the surreal beauty of nature unfold, without rushing back to the warmth of your house, or longingly staring through the classroom window. Everything about mid-june was made for taking it easy and enjoying your surroundings, especially if you were in Seattle like me. Out your window you could see every tree, every plant, a different shade of bright lime. If you were lucky, you might even catch a couple blue jays minding their own business, gathering seeds or just hopping about without a care in the world, or a tiny chickadee with a stick for it's nest. But, I'm not here to write a college essay about summer vacation, I'm here to set the record straight. The Caroline-Edwards case, the missing three, the conspiracy theories… I'm here to say my side of the story. Believe what I write in these many pages, or just ignore it, either way, I'm telling you firsthand about how I was thrust through the fabric of reality and fiction.

I should probably start with an introduction. My name is Ethan Schade, age 17. At this point I had just finished my junior year of high school, and it felt amazing to finally be free from having to worry about things like homework or cramming for a test. Normally, I'd be working at Chick-Fil-A on a friday, but I was off that day for renovations to the restaurant. I might have been able to go outside and practice soccer or shoot airsoft targets, but with the blazing heat above 83 F and climbing higher, I was only really left with one option: The Great Indoors. Wouldn't be a problem for anyone else, but I was an only child, so with my parents away on vacation, and no summer classes or plans for the entire afternoon, boredom was killing me. My car was lent out, nothing remotely interesting was in walking distance, and there wasn't a lot to do in an empty house with a busted computer and a cable television to entertain me. The set of brass cookware hung and carefully arranged seemed to call me, but cooking some sort of dish took heat, and the bit of cool air I had in the house was far too precious to waste. I could've maybe been doing something productive like cleaning, but instead, I was browsing some new recipes to try out. I was just about to turn my phone off when I heard the familiar pling of a notification.

* * *

**New Message**

From Lexi

Want to hang? My parents left to go meet up with a friend, and my sister went with them. I found a few old files I thought we could dust off.

* * *

It wasn't much, but it was better than doing nothing. Alexis Shaw, or as she liked to be called, "Lexi", was my best friend since the sixth grade. Now we were both going into our last year of high school, but she was a year younger than me. If anyone could be considered my partner in crime, it would have to be her. We weren't the kind of people that would be considered the "problem kids", but we still had our fun when we weren't playing video games. Lexi was the kind of person that's super smart when it came to books and really practical, but for some reason also a firm believer in anything occult. She's tall and slender, with long, straight, golden-blonde hair that came down to her chest. Unlike me, she was very emotional, and always chose to try and solve problems with her heart rather than her head. Sometimes I couldn't stand her, but despite our differences, she's been faithfully by my side through a few tough years, and if it really came down to it, I would do anything for Lexi, even if I give her a hard time whenever the opportunity arises.

I locked up our small four-square house and walked three blocks north, across the park with the one long neglected swingset, and past a few houses east, to a large two-story residence sat on a hill in the suburbs. As my familiar footsteps got closer to the concrete steps that led her back gate, Lexi's corgi Kayla burst out of a doggy door, waddling her little butt as fast as her stubby legs would carry her. The sight of the incoming floof torpedo made my thighs instinctually tense as I prepared for the all-out corgassault that I knew was about to come. Kayla jumped on her hind stumps, putting her front paws on the top of the gate door.

"What a good girl!" I aggressively pet the vibrating mass of fur, trying to get the latch open. Kayla wasted no time showing me her love once I got the door ajar, leaping up to my waist and nearly knocking me over. When Lexi came out to see the damage, Kayla darted to her owner, then back to me for the treat she knew I had brought for her.

"Roll over!" I used my baby voice that dogs love, petting Kayla on her belly as she obeyed my command. "Good girl, good girl." I gave her tummy rubs before throwing the dog treat near her face. The little ball of processed meat didn't even get to hit the ground before Kayla crunched it up. Kayla got to her feet and swallowed her tidbit, proudly trotting back to Lexi, satisfied with her work.

Lexi waved at me as I came across the small, but beautifully maintained backyard, passing an ornate stone fountain, and carefully crossed through thick beds of marigolds and tulips, to a covered patio with a grill on the side. Once I had made it to her, she enveloped me in one of her infamously tight bear hugs, her trademark greeting for anyone she wasn't a complete stranger with.

"Hey, Lex." I mumbled to her, once she had finished squeezing the air out of my lungs like a human accordion.

Lexi was wearing bright lime leggings and a floral undershirt. Clearly, just like me, she didn't have anywhere to be. I'm pretty sure if she could freely pick her outfit any day she wanted to, she would wear flip flops and sweatpants to a wedding. Of course, what she wore never really bothered me, I just always thought she never quite grasped the concept of "formality."

"Ethan! Come on in. Want something to drink?" She let the kitchen door swing closed behind us as I walked inside.

"I'm good," I responded, petting Kayla. "I had some water before I came over."

"I hope you didn't have too much, you know how many calories it has," she was trying to goad me, but I didn't take the bait. "C'mon, live a little. Here." She tossed me a coke from the fridge. "I feel like brushing up on a few old coin-ops, that cool with you?" Before I could answer, Lexi handed me a controller, that had a long, thin wire stretching across the living room and plugged into her desktop computer's USB port.

The two of us crashed on the family couch as her game system loaded up. The familiar sound of her Linux booting welcomed us back into the world of games we had sunk hours into beating together.

"So, you know what day it is? Lexi asked, browsing through her collection of titles she ported to an emulator.

"Friday?" I looked at my phone. "June? Am I missing something obvious?"

Lexi looked at me like I was an idiot. "Friday the 13th? Duh."

I fake facepalmed. "Of course, how could anyone forget?" I mocked. As I said earlier, Lexi was very superstitious, but not me. I preferred to trust hard fact, not stupid myths.

"Here, haven't done this one in ages!" She pulled up an ancient file from an unnamed folder, named joust.iso.

Joust was a game that came out in the 80's, but even though the simple game's crude graphics predated my existence by almost 20 years, it was still one of my favorite games of all time, and Lexi knew it. We both loved it, as did we most retro games. Between the two of us, you could probably make an entire arcade from memory alone. If you wanted to know anything about a console, from the commodore 64 to the wii, Lexi would be the one to talk to. But I always had a soft spot for the arcade classics, like Zaxxon, Tempest, Dig Dug, and Pac-Man. Aside from cooking, those games were my favorite thing to tear into when I needed a pick-me-up.

Now I should mention that Lexi had a bit of an anger problem when it came to video games. So, when she ducked underneath one of the many buzzard-mounted riders only to immediately get a lance in the back, ending her final life, she was furious. A controller went hurtling through the air, crashing into and destroying a small metal nightstand, cracking many of the tiny 1cm by 1cm mirror tiles that had been attached as decorative trim. Lexi ran over, mortified, picking up little bits of table and broken plastic.

"You really need to work on self control." I looked at the ruined furniture. It was very, very badly damaged. No amount of duct tape could fix the mess in front of me. "It looks like it'll need to be replaced."

She didn't respond.

"Joel is gonna kill you," I walked closer to her. Still silence. "Maybe with some super glue-" It was only when I was right next to her that I realized she was spouting a stream of expletives under her breath.

"It's really not that bad," My voice was visibly nervous now. "What's wrong?"

She looked at me, pointing to the several glass tiles that had been split apart by the force of the impact. Sometimes she would do little gestures like that, and it was my job to interpret their meaning. Well this one roughly translated in Lexi code for "We just messed up big time."

I grabbed an old straw broom and dustpan from her parents' closet. "Don't give me that look," I started sweeping up the smaller pieces. "Help me clean it up!"

"No… you don't get it…"

I could hear the worry in her voice.

"I don't care about the table, look at all the broken mirrors. Do you know what that means, especially on-" Lexi paused, whether it was genuine fear, or for dramatic effect, i couldn't tell. "-on Friday the 13th?"

"It means that I'm not gonna stand here and clean up this mess alone. Now help me out here!" I collected the glass and dumped it in the trash. "This better not be about that stupid missing persons case from years ago."

Apparently there was a big unsolved mystery about this fourteen year-old named Lynn who mysteriously went missing. Of course, the only reason I knew about it was because it was all Lexi talked about for three weeks in a row. I guess according to one of her friends, I think their name was Delilah, she had broken a mirror in a mall, and then when her parents came to look for her, she was gone. All they found as "evidence" was a tv, still attuned on the 4Kids channel. In my opinion, the whole thing was kinda creepy, but not really enough to be considered a paranormal event.

"I didn't even think of that. Oh, no. This isn't good. We're in trouble… this can't end well. I need to get some horseshoes-."

"Relax, It's just a stupid myth." I cut off Lexi's rambling. "Don't have an aneurysm."

Still seeing the embossed red "Enter thy name" on screen followed by three spaces for initials, I decided to make a point. "Here. Since you broke your controller, why don't we watch some TV. In fact, I know the perfect channel." I typed 4-K-I-D-S into the search bar.

"This isn't funny, Ethan." Lexi tried to grab the remote from my hands, but I was taller than her, and if there's one thing I learned from our friendship, it was how to use that to my advantage. "You're really playing with fire here!"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you!" I sat down on the sofa. "Everything's fine. Nothing's going wrong, just mediocre shows and one overreacting idiot."

Lexi sat down on the couch. "You're right…" She yawned. "What.. am… I..."

Her head relaxed against mine. "What are you doing?" I asked her, for some reason my voice came out as an uninterested, monotone drivel. I turned to see her crashed out. "Hey. This isn't cute." I shook her. But she wasn't responding. I didn't know if she was actually unconscious, but she may as well have been. I let her go, causing her to fall limp.

I would have screamed, but suddenly… I started to feel really tired… Surely… if I closed my eyes for one second… it wouldn't be too bad, right? On the TV, two brightly colored caricatures of kids sat in a japanese restaurant. What was going on? A wave of searing heat washed over me like a fever. Then, before I knew what had happened, I was out cold, lying limp on the couch.


End file.
